Subtle and Quick to Anger
by TheRedPoet
Summary: Prologue to the Fifth story in the Fight and Flight-verse.


The room reeked of fear. It lingered on the back of my tongue like dark chocolate, bitterness sweetened with honey.

Four men sat tied to chairs, bound by their hands and feet. Their eyes were covered by thick scraps of cloth and gags kept them silent. More or less. The nearest man was young, in his early twenties at most, with an attempted soul patch and bleached white dreadlocks wriggling down along his shoulders like worms.

I settled sideways astride his knees and yanked his blindfold off. The gag followed and I almost wished I'd left it in. His breath stank of bile and cigarettes, saliva dribbling down his chin in slow, viscous runnels.

"What's your name?" I had to speak with a raised voice to be heard.

He blinked drunkenly and stared at me, as if trying to decide if I was real or not. Then, slowly, his eyes darted to the side, toward the long corridor leading into the little room they were currently in. I caught his chin before he could turn his head and see it properly.

"Look at me," I said, my softly spoken words gaining an edge of steel. "What is your name?"

"Kevin," he whimpered. "Listen - I don't-"

"Shush." My finger pressed to his lips and he went quiet. "You're going to tell me everything you know, Kevin. Aren't you?"

"I don't know shit!"

I let the emotion fade into a look of cold calculation, staring him down. There's a certain scent to a lie, potent enough to overcome the stagnant smell of body odor, tobacco and vomit, and this wasn't it. I could work with that too.

"Are you sure?" I asked, all pretense at kindness gone.

"I don't know anything, I swear!"

I turned to my second prisoner, a man in his early forties, his muscular arms covered in tattoos and scars, and ripped off his blindfold, too before returning to Kevin.

His voice rose in volume to frantic screams as I hauled him to his feet by the front of his shirt. He wobbled precariously for a moment, and then I turned him toward the open door. He froze in place at the sight before him, mouth falling open in abject horror. I couldn't blame him.

Arms stretched out through the entire sixty feet of the hallway. Nightmarishly long, spindly, chalk-white arms, ending in human hands, long fingers grasping. Dozens of them filled up the hallway and reached blindly through the air and the sound of muffled moans bled together into a single long wailing.

"Please!" Kevin screamed. "Please!"

I planted a combat boot against his spine and kicked hard. Kevin wasn't a big guy from the get-go and with his feet tied by the ankles, he toppled forward like a load of bricks. Pale, cold hands shot out with blinding speed, seizing the young man by his arms and legs and dragging him into their midst.

He screamed and screamed, shrill cries echoing off the concrete walls. His friends winced and shied away from the sounds of sheer terror as far as their bonds would allow. As Kevin reached the end of the hallway, things got worse. The creature's body was in the other room. A huge, pale, writhing amorphous mass of scabbed, pale flesh. The hands pressed the man's flailing form against its body and the flesh split open. For a moment, the sound of thousands upon thousands of voices, all different and all crying out in agonized despair, washed over the room as he was forced inside the pallid mass that made up the creature's body.

Kevin's screams mingled with the other voices as he fought to get free, his arm getting stuck outside of the creature's body as the flesh bubbled and merged together seamlessly. The limb twitched a few times and then grew still. The noise faded into the background again. Then Kevin's arm twitched again, a violent jerk that broke the bone at his elbow joint. It broke again, and again, and again, each sound echoing sharply off the bare walls. The t-shirt he'd worn melted off his arm as the limb slowly grew paler, lengthening with continuous snappings of bone, extending among the others.

I stalked over to prisoner number two, the leather duster flapping at my ankles, and removed his gag. He immediately started crying for God, his mother-anyone out there who would listen.

But there was no God listening. No angels, no savior there to save his wretched life.

Just me.

I leaned in close. Some of the anger slipped out of my grasp before I could wrest control of my voice back and the words came out in a harsh snarl.

"I'm going to ask you this once, and only once. Where is Harry Dresden?"


End file.
